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Two Questions

1) The PA in the SEOmoz toolbar for ldnwicklesscandles.com/scentsy-uk/ is completely different to http://www.ldnwicklesscandles.com/scentsy-uk. I think in link building I've occasionally left the / off and vice versa. Is google seeing these as two different sites and how can I combine the two so the PA is no longer different? I initially tried a 301 redirect from the less PA to the higher one but it didn't work. Suggestions please.

2) I'm trying to rank for the term Scentsy UK. Was told on here that it was unnecessary to get a .co.uk and that if I just link build for my scentsy-uk site which I have been doing. Woke up this morning and my page ldnwicklesscandles.com/scentsy-uk was no where to be seen on Google. I can still do site: and Link: for my main .com and I'm still ranking first page for other things so don't think I've been penalised at all. However when I try the site: and link: on the .com/scentsy-uk its no where to be found. There was no messages in Google webmaster tools either.

Is this an algorithm thing or have I been penalised?

Also....its now pulling up www.ldnwicklesscandles.com/blog/tag/scentsy-uk for the higher ranking results. Have I confused google with having this blog tag as well? Any suggestions to help would be appreciated. Losing a lot of sleep on this website at the moment. x

If you're site is still serving both the URL with a trailing slash and a duplicate URL without it, that is definitely something that should be remedied as soon as possible, as your authority from external links is likely being split between the two URLS.

There's two ways to do this... 301 redirection and rel canonical tags. In my opinion a site-wide 301 redirect rule is absolutely the best solution to this problem. The code below will uses Apache's Rewrite Engine to redirect traffic and "linkjuice" to the URL with a trailing slash, which is what I would suggest.

Just add this to the .htaccess file located in the root directory of your domain.

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yourdomain.com/$1/ [L,R=301]

It's possible that the first two lines are already present, in which case you should paste lines 3 - 5 as they are above. *Replace 'yourdomain.com' with your domain.

You can be sure that the rule is working correctly by going to 'yourdomain.com/page' and confirming that you're redirected to 'yourdomain.com/page/'.

I also noticed in your question that you used both 'WWW.yourdomain.com' and 'yourdomain.com' when describing your issue. If you're seeing both WWW and non-WWW versions of your pages in search results, it's possible that you have another duplicate content issue, potentially allowing Google to index 4 duplicate versions of the same page... looks like you're good to go though ;-) ... I just checked and all non-WWW URLs are redirecting to the WWW versions, so just make sure you add the WWW to the last line of code above (www.yourdomain.com).

For other potential readers:

Site-wide non-WWW to WWW 301 redirects can be implemented by adding:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

The opposite (WWW to non-WWW) can be implemented by adding:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.yourdomain.com [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

*Replace 'yourdomain.com' with your domain and omit Line 1 if it is already present.

It'll take a little time for Google to account for the changes, but if you're redirected when you do the test I mentioned, you can sit back and relax.

The site is through squarespace so I've contacted support to ask whether any of this is possible. I don't believe we are given access to our .htaccess files but have asked to double check.

The only reason why I noticed the different PA's is I happened to type in the different versions of the address in my own location/address bar on the top of Firefox. I did a quick look on Google and only one seems to be getting indexed which funny enough seems to be slightly different as well.

So to clarify:

www.ldnwicklesscandles.com/scentsy-UK/

Showing up on google, clicked on it and the PA in the toolbar in my browser was showing as 1

www.ldnwicklesscandles.com/scentsy-uk/

shows up as a PA of 17

www.ldnwicklesscandles.com/scentsy-uk

shows up as a PA of 20

Could it just be a problem with the toolbar? I guess I'm just worried that all these sites are showing as different PA when what I want is just one PA throughout any of the variations people may come across.

It could be an issue with the toolbar that's causing the PA of 1 to show up for the first (UK) url you mentioned, but the other two are likely correct.

At the moment you have two distinct pages:

www.ldnwicklesscandles.com/scentsy-uk

and

www.ldnwicklesscandles.com/scentsy-uk/

that have the exact same (duplicate) content, and both of which likely have links pointing to them. The same goes for every page on your site, so you're definitely losing some ranking power.

All of your pages should either end with a slash or not end with a slash... it doesn't really matter which one you choose, it just needs to be constant throughout the site. I checked your HTML and there are no Canonical tags, so I'd recommend asking SquareSpace to go ahead and add the first Rewrite I posted earlier to your .htaccess file. I'm sure they've had many similar requests, so it shouldn't be too much of a hassle. Once that's finished you should be good to go!

I've asked squarespace for help and they basically said they wont alter any of the httaccess file for me, asked around in the squarespace community and they started saying that this was SEOmoz's crawlers which are completely different to Google and as long as two url's weren't showing up in Google (which they aren't...just two different PA's on the SEOmoz toolbar)...then to not worry about it. They said that Google is smart enough to decide between the two and that from now on I should just focus on one URL for link building.

Feeling a bit deflated....maybe I shouldn't worry about it though. Wish squarespace wasn't so limiting on controls TBH.

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